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Color Recasts Itself as a Facebook Photo and Video App

By Jenna Wortham September 22, 2011 1:12 pmSeptember 22, 2011 1:12 pm

Back in March, a splashy start-up called Color Labs introduced a cellphone app that let people share pictures with friends and strangers nearby. The service seemed to have everything going for it: an accomplished serial entrepreneur at its helm and $41 million in the bank from noted investors like Bain and Sequoia Capital.

There was just one thing missing: users.

The new version of Color is built on top of Facebook.

Although 1 million people downloaded the original app, barely 10 percent are still using it, said Bill Nguyen, the perennially chipper chief executive and co-founder of Color. “And that’s if I’m lucky.”

But on Thursday, during f8, Facebook’s developer conference in San Francisco, Mr. Nguyen is introducing a fully revamped version of Color. It will retain the same name, but instead of relying on its members to generate pictures to share, it will pull in all of their photos from Facebook and arrange them in a easily browsable format. And as on Facebook, people can “like” and comment on photographs, as well as share them on the app and to the Web site through Color’s mobile application. The application will also let users create, edit and share group photo albums — a functionality that Facebook has not yet offered.

But the killer feature of the new Color, Mr. Nguyen says, is the ability to let friends “visit” one another through the application, or tune in live and see what their friends are doing at that exact moment. Say, for example, that a friend posts a picture from a Justin Bieber concert. Other friends using the application, or who see the picture on Facebook, can request a “visit” through the application — or permission to begin live-streaming with that friend and see what they’re seeing at that moment.

Users don’t have to be actively using the application to request visits with friends. If someone is bored and curious about what their friend is up to, the application will send a push notification letting the recipient know her friend wants to start a live stream. People can view the live stream through the application, or through Facebook’s Web site. In addition, other friends can choose to tune in and watch the broadcast. Color says it built the live streaming architecture itself and incorporated the remaining technology from the first version of Color for the revamped version. It works on both iPhone and Android devices and over both 3G and Wi-Fi networks.

The primary reason Color fell flat on its face after it was released, its creators say, was because there weren’t enough people using it to make it interesting enough to revisit on a regular basis.

“I’d take a picture on Color and what, 20 people could see it?” said Mr. Nguyen. “Now we’re talking about access to 750 million users instead of 1 million.”

The company, which was originally trying to establish its own app-centric, proximity-based social network, scrapped that plan and “decided to build an end-to-end service on Facebook because it has such massive scale and reach,” he said.

Even if the first version of Color had taken off, Mr. Nguyen said, “it still would have been a drop in the bucket when compared to Facebook.”

He said the new Color won’t interfere with any photo-sharing services that Facebook may eventually roll out, because Color is enabling a new kind of experience between the mobile phone and the Web. He also doesn’t think it’ll compete with Skype or FaceTime because the application isn’t designed for private, one-to-one conversations.

“It lets people create their own broadcast network,” he said.

The new version of Color will remain in private beta testing for a while longer, he said. Eventually, the company will roll out invites to a larger group that includes the users of the original application.

Mr. Nguyen, who described himself as a “social recluse,” said that he realized that Color needed to be more engaging and more social to lure in new users who would find it rewarding.

Ultimately, it’s why he thinks this version of the application will succeed.

“If we’re lucky, we can create a new social norm and a sense of empathy and engagement around what we’re doing and how people are sharing,” he said.